David Malouf (b. 1934) was born of Lebanese and British parents in Brisbane and was educated at Brisbane grammar school and the University of Queensland, where he taught for two years after graduation. He spent the next decade, from 1959 to 1968, in England and Italy, returning to Australia in 1968, where he took a position teaching English at the University of Sydney. His first novel was published in 1975 and was adapted for the stage in 2004. The Great World, published in 1990, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the French Prix Femina Etranger. Remembering Babylon, published in 1993, was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize.

Tania Malyarchuk (b. 1983) is one of Ukraine’s most talented young prose writers. Her first novel, Adolpho’s Endspiel, or a Rose for Liza, appeared in 2004. Her later collections of shorter prose works include From Above Looking Down: A Book of Fears (2006), How I Became a Saint (2006), To Speak (2007), Bestiary of Words (2009), and Divine Comedy (2009). She is currently a writer-in-residence in Vienna, Austria.

Bill Manhire directs the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. His Collected Poems appeared in 2001, while more recent collections are the award-winning Lifted (2005) and Victims of Lightning (2010); a Selected Poems will be published next year. He has spent time in Antarctica, and edited the 2004 anthology of Antarctic poetry and fiction, The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica.

Eduard Màrquez published two books of poetry in Spanish before writing Zugzwang (1995), his first work in Catalan and the source of the fiction that appears above. Other excerpts from Zugzwang have appeared in such magazines as Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, and Chicago Review. He has continued writing in Catalan, publishing another collection of short fiction, twelve children’s books, and four novels. His 2006 novel, La decisió de Brandes (Brandes’s decision), won several Catalan prizes, including the Premi de la Critica.

M. Elise Marubbio is an associate professor at Augsburg College (Minneapolis). Her first book, Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film, won the Peter C. Rollins Book Award. She will give a keynote talk at the Native Crossroads film festival at the University of Oklahoma (March 5–7). She will give a keynote talk at the 2015 Native Crossroads film festival at the University of Oklahoma (March 5–7).

John Mateer was born in South Africa and lives in Australia. He has published several collections, the most recent of which are Ex-White: South African Poems (2009), The West: Australian Poems 1989–2009 (2010), and Southern Barbarians (2011), a volume on the vestiges of the Portuguese empire. To read more about Southern Barbarians, visit http://www.giramondopublishing.com/southern-barbarians. At present he is working on a book of poems about the idea of "the Moor."

Ngwatilo Mawiyoo’s new research explores the homes and lives of families in rural Kenya. She plans to release a book of poems on the subject in 2012, to follow her critically acclaimed first collection, Blue Mothertongue (2010), which explored similar ideas as they manifest in Nairobi and the African diaspora. In performance she often collaborates with musicians and other artists; exploring their potential to “tell” poetry in an aesthetic she dubs “Puesic” [pew-zik].

Paula Meehan was born and reared in the north inner city of Dublin. She was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and received an MFA degree from Eastern Washington University. She has published five collections of poetry and numerous stage and radio plays. She has been the recipient of many awards, among them the Butler Award for Poetry from the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature, and the Denis Devlin Memorial Award for her most recent collection of poems, Dharmakaya (Wake Forest University Press). She is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Academy for the Arts, and teaches in a project for stabilized drug users and in other community contexts. A fine-art edition of new work (with Theo Dorgan and Tony Curtis) is forthcoming from Brooding Heron Press (located on Waldron Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington State).

João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999) was a Brazilian poet and diplomat. After moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1942, he published his first collection of poems, entitled Pedra do Sono. In 1947 he was assigned to his first diplomatic post in Spain, where he continued to write. Most of Cabral's life was spent as a diplomat, which afforded him the opportunity to travel the world. Through all of his travels, he continued to write poetry, and at the end of his life, he had published over fifteen collections. He is considered one of the greatest Brazilian poets of all time.

Gombojavin Mend-Ooyo was born in Dariganga Province, Mongolia, in 1952. A poet, novelist, calligrapher, and cultural scholar, he is the director of the Mongolian Academy of Culture and Poetry in Ulaanbaatar.

Poet, playwright, and cultural critic Norge Espinosa Mendoza (b. 1971, Santa Clara) holds the distinction of being the first Cuban to participate in the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program. Founder of the Jornadas de Arte Homoerótico and co-organizer of Cuba’s annual Jornada contra la Homofobia, he is widely considered one of Cuba’s most important LGBT activists. His poem “Vestido de novia” was the first poem on a homoerotic theme to win the Premio de Poesía from Cuba’s state cultural magazine El Caimán Barbudo and has since become one of the most anthologized poems by poets of his generation. His most recent book, Cuerpos de un deseo diferente (Ediciones Matanzas, 2013), is a collection of poems, reviews, and essays on topics related to LGBT life in Cuba.

Ana Menéndez is the author of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, Loving Che, and The Last War. “You Are the Heirs of All My Terrors” is part of a new short-story collection, Adios Happy Homeland!, to be published by Grove/Atlantic’s Black Cat imprint in 2011. She lives in Miami and Amsterdam.

Rima Najjar Merriman is a professor of English literature at Al Quds University. She is one of the contributing writers for the recently published Al Jazeera English - Global News in a Changing World, and she contributed a chapter on Palestinian children in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Children’s Issues Worldwide.

Claire Messud is the author of three novels and a book of novellas. Her last novel, The Emperor’s Children, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was selected by the New York Times as one of their ten best books of 2006. She spent the academic year 2010–11 as a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Her new novel, The Woman Upstairs, will be published in 2013.